YESTERDAY …

(As reported in the Bangor Daily News)

10 years ago – Oct. 25, 1997

BANGOR – “Great Expectations” says everything about the Intown Arts Gallery. It is the title of the exhibit at the gallery’s new home on Columbia Street in the stately brick Coe building, but it also is how members feel about the expanding group of artists.

The art scene in Bangor is being democratized through the Intown Arts Center. To Lanford Warner, one of several on the gallery’s board of directors, the fourth incarnation of the gallery since it began in 1991 offers new hope for area artists to assume a community presence.

Until now, the Intown Arts Center had been limited to about a dozen members. Its membership now nears 50.

ORONO – Elaine Ford sits in a quiet, stark office on the top floor of the English department at the University of Maine. Across the hall, students drag metal desks over the classroom floor. They are getting ready for class, says Ford, a novelist and professor of creative writing. Her tone is teacherly and direct.

They are moving the desks into a circle, she clarifies. That circle, one of the oldest configurations for storytelling, is the site at which her students have learned to talk about stories, to test their skills at reading and writing and dissecting.

25 years ago – Oct. 25, 1982

BANGOR – When James Riley of Bangor was in his 50s, a physician told him unless he set aside a time to rest from the pressures of his business every afternoon he wouldn’t live to be very old. Riley, then owner of a garage in Old Town, took the physician’s advice. It must have worked. He celebrated his 94th birthday in September.

Born Sept. 9, 1888, in Brown County, N.Y., Riley left high school at a young age to go to work. He became a chauffeur in New York City, a job he worked at for some 30 years, serving a senator and several wealthy families.

Riley, of Irish descent, saw military action in World War I. After returning from the war he went back to being a chauffeur. While bringing a family to Maine one summer, he met and married the former Katherine Deuprey of Stillwater. They eventually moved to Old Town where he owned a garage business in town and at Stillwater Corner for many years. He retired in 1957 and he and his wife moved to Florida where they lived for 25 y ears.

While in Florida, he started raising parakeets as a hobby. At one time he had more than 700 birds.

Riley still takes an afternoon nap, a habit he credits for his long and healthy life.

50 years ago – Oct. 25, 1957

ORONO – Leroy W. Smith, 26 Pine St., an 81-year-old Orono resident, apparently does not suffer from agoraphobia. Soon after fall set in, he completed shingling one side of his house roof.

“I lacked one shingle of laying 7,000,” he remarked.

“Smithy,” as he is better known, celebrated his 81st birthday on July 19. He was born in Bangor. He retired in 1950 after serving as a machinist for the Eastern Corp. for a number of years. Before that, he was a machinist for the Orono Pulp and Paper Co.

Smith and his wife, Elizabeth, enjoy reading the Bangor Daily News and had nothing but praise for their newspaper boys. “Smithy” said with pride that he was once a newspaper boy.

“I sold the Bangor Daily News the first day it was ever printed as the NEWS,” he said. “That was when I was 13 years of age. The paper was 5 cents a copy and I sold 100 copies.”

100 years ago – Oct. 25, 1907

CASTINE – Miss Kate Davenport, our popular librarian at the town library, was a passenger this morning for Boston, where she will spend a number of weeks in vacation.

Mr. Albert McIntire and Augustus Coner, who have been employed on the yacht Aria of Bangor the past summer, have returned home.

BANGOR – Seldom have there been better pictures at the Nickel Theatre than the list which will be shown today, including a skillful mingling of drama, comedy and magic.

“The Life of a Bootblack” takes an entire reel. It shows how a little boy is reared in a home of misery and poverty; of how to escape the beatings of his brutal stepfather, he runs away; and of his wanderings about the city. He finds friends, one of them a bright little girl, and manages to make his way. Finally, a rich man gives him a $5 gold piece in mistake for a nickel. The boy returns it and finds in this rich man a true benefactor. Years afterward, grown to manhood and a prosperous physician, he meets with his mother, old and feeble now, and still wretchedly poor. On the effective tableau of their meeting, the film ends.

BUCKSPORT – The work on the Bucksport and Verona bridge has been completed for the present. The Bucksport end has been practically rebuilt. The draw and piers have been put in condition to last for a number of years. The Verona end from the draw will need attention the coming year.

ORONO – It may be of interest to know the amounts of mail handled at the Orono post office in one week. By actual count from postmaster C.H. White, there were 7,239 pieces Oct. 13-19 – 4,329 letters, 1,358 postcards, 138 second-class newspapers, magazines, etc., 97 third-class circulars, books, etc., 60 pieces of fourth-class merchandise and 1,257 pieces of free matter. Receipts were $108.35.

Compiled by Ardeana Hamlin